A Ring of Endless Light: The Austin Family Chronicles, Book 4

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  Suzy’s voice was trembling. “Porpoises, a thousand porpoises beaten to death with clubs.”

  Mother looked shocked. “Where?”

  John looked up from the paper. “Japan.”

  “But why,” Suzy moaned, “why did those fishermen have to kill them?”

  “Because they were eating all the fish,” John explained, “and the Japanese fishermen depend on the fish for their livelihood.”

  “But to kill them,” Suzy protested, “to club them to death when they’re so friendly and playful and unsuspecting—”

  Suzy’s relations with animals have always been passionate. But Daddy says she won’t be a good doctor or vet until she can control her emotions. Now she was outraged and tears quivered on her long, dark lashes. She brushed them away, shaking her head so that her tousled hair caught the fire of the sun. There’s no denying that Suzy’s got looks as well as brains. I have brains, I guess, but next to Suzy I don’t have looks. However, as Fortescue said, and Mother keeps reminding us, comparisons are odious.

  John handed the paper back to Daddy. “Full of comforting little tidbits, isn’t it? Porpoises clubbed to death; a bus hit by a train; a lethal explosion at an oil refinery; a—”

  “Stop!” I held up my hand. “You sound like Zachary!” And I thought of Adam’s summer project, and how he’d probably feel as sick as Suzy about the porpoises.

  “It’s all there in the paper, Vic,” John said quietly. “I thought a year in New York had you over your illusion that we live in a safe and peaceful world.”

  “But the porpoises!” Again Suzy’s purple eyes filled with tears. “Those other things are accidents, but the fishermen clubbed the porpoises to death on purpose.”

  “As John pointed out,” Daddy said, “those fishermen depend on fish for a living.”

  “It’s lousy, Suze,” John said. “I agree with you about that. But I can see, too, that the fishermen may have been desperate, with kids to feed and no money coming in. Which do you choose, people or porpoises?”

  “Porpoises,” Suzy replied without hesitation. “Porpoises don’t hurt anybody. They don’t murder or have wars. They don’t pollute the environment.”

  “But,” John added, “they eat the fish which are a matter of life and death for a fishing village.”

  “I hate it!” Now Suzy did start to cry.

  “Let her weep,” Grandfather said softly to Mother. “We’ve none of us done our grieving about Jack Rodney.”

  It seemed there was death everywhere. The paper was always full of death, violent death, accidental death, wanton death. I think I felt as bad as Suzy did about the porpoises, as bad as Adam would feel, but my eyes were dry.

  John rose. “Time for me to get to work. Dr. Nora Zand’s a stickler for people being early. Not just punctual, mind you, but early. Otherwise, she’s a super boss and trusts me to do all kinds of things on my own. All right if I bring Adam home for dinner sometime, Mother?”

  “Just give me a little warning so I can water the soup.”

  “Maybe tonight, then, if he’s free, okay?”

  Mother nodded. “Okay.”

  “See you a little after five.”

  John was lucky to have something definite to do for the summer. He finished his first year at M.I.T. with all kinds of honors, which made job hunting easier for him than for people without his kind of record.

  I didn’t take a job for the summer because Daddy’d asked me not to. The Woods, in the big house down the hill (the people who’d sold Grandfather the stable), wanted me to work for them. Their seven-year-old grandson was spending most of the summer with them, and they wanted me to baby-sit him, and cook lunch, and do odd jobs. We all try to work as much as we can, to help earn money for college, and I thought I was all set. But Daddy took me aside.

  “Vic, this is asking a lot of you, but I’d appreciate it if you’d let Suzy take the job at the Woods’.”

  “Why?” I asked indignantly.

  “This is going to be a rough summer for all of us, but particularly for your mother. I’d like you to stick around to help out with anything that’s needed—the cooking—though there won’t be much of that, because she loves to cook. Basically, to be moral support, and to help with Grandfather.”

  “Oh.” He didn’t need to say anything more. “Sure. I’ll be glad to.”

  “And I’ll pay you what you’d have got at the Woods’ .”

  “No! I don’t want any money, Daddy, honestly. Not for helping Mother or Grandfather. Please.”

  He looked at me from under his nice bushy eyebrows, and his brown eyes smiled. “We’ll think of something, then. Thanks, Vic.”

  “Sure.”

  As it turned out, Suzy didn’t want the job with the Woods. She said she’d find something to do around the docks. “Rob’s enough of a seven-year-old kid. I couldn’t stomach another for a whole summer.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I said. “They’re offering good money.”

  “You take the job, then.”

  I shut up. It wasn’t that Daddy’d sworn me to secrecy about staying home, but I knew he didn’t want me to talk about it. And Suzy’s never liked baby-sitting. She may want to be a doctor, but her specialty won’t be pediatrics.

  Three things happened at once. Rob came down for breakfast; the phone rang; and Leo Rodney and his brother, Jacky, came along the path and up to the porch.

  “I’ll get the phone.” Suzy hurried into the kitchen and I let her. It mightn’t be Zachary, but if it was, I didn’t want to appear too eager.

  Leo knocked. “Hi.”

  “Come in,” Grandfather called, and Leo and Jacky pushed the screen door open.

  “Where’s Suzy?” Jacky asked.

  Leo spoke simultaneously, “Come for a walk, Vicky?”

  My ears were cocked toward the house. “Suzy’s on the phone.”

  “Vicky,” she called, “it’s for you.”

  I called back, “Who is it?” After all, we’ve been coming to Seven Bay Island all our lives. There were other people it could be besides Zachary.

  Suzy slammed onto the porch without answering, so I knew it was.

  “Be back,” I said to Leo, and went in, nearly falling over Rochester, who was lying in the way as usual. I went through the kitchen and to Grandfather’s study. “Hi,” I said into the phone.

  “Vicky-O.”

  Nobody but Zachary has ever called me Vicky-O, but automatically I asked, “Who is it?”

  “Who do you think it is, idiot?”

  “I’m not an idiot, and I’m aware that you’re Zachary Grey.” It was not the ideal way to begin a conversation.

  “Get off your high horse, Vicky. ’Smatter of fact, do you want to come horseback riding this morning?”

  To my surprise I heard myself saying, “I can’t. I’m going for a walk with Leo.” Now why on earth did I say that? When I went to the phone I thought Zachary was going to be my excuse for not going for a walk with Leo.

  “Who’s Leo?”

  “He’s the oldest son of Commander Rodney—whose funeral we were at yesterday,” I replied clumsily.

  There was an odd silence at the other end of the line. Then, “How about this afternoon?”

  “This afternoon’s fine.”

  “Good. Pick you up about two.” He hung up without saying goodbye. Zachary would never identify himself on the phone for me; he was certain I’d recognize his voice. And yet I felt he was far less sure of himself than he wanted me to think he was—or than he wanted himself to think he was.

  I went back to the porch. Rob was eating toast and homemade beach-plum jam. Suzy and Jacky had gone off somewhere together. Leo was patiently waiting for me.

  “Do you have to go somewhere with someone, Vicky, or can you come for a walk with me?” Leo was anything but sure of himself.

  I looked at Mother, who nodded. “I can go for a walk.” I tried to sound more enthusiastic than I felt.

  We said goodbye and started off. “Whe
re’ll we go?” Leo asked.

  “To the beach.”

  Grandfather’s stable is up on a bluff, at the highest end of the Island. The quickest way to the beach is down a very steep path cut into the bluff and kept from erosion by logs pounded in horizontally every yard or so. Tough little bushes have grown up on either side, and they can help slow your descent if you get ahead of yourself, or help pull you up on the steep climb home. The beach at the foot of the bluff is a lovely crescent which we call Grandfather’s cove. There’s a rock there that I like to sit on, particularly when the tide is coming in, and I can watch the little waves coming closer, breaking in pearly patterns of foam.

  Now the tide was going out and the rock was high and dry. The sand around it had dried in the morning sun and wind, though if we dug down with our fingers the water would squish against them.

  Leo walked slowly along the ocean’s edge, letting the waves break over the toes of his sneakers. We both had on jeans and T-shirts, but I was wearing sandals and I took them off so I could wade. It wasn’t until his sneakers were thoroughly wet and sandy that Leo bent down to unlace them and pull them off.

  We splashed along in silence. We left Grandfather’s protected cove, and the waves were rougher and the pull of undertow stronger. Leo turned inland and I followed him to the bare fallen trunk of a once great elm. All the bark was long gone, and the old wood had washed smooth in the rains and salt winds; it made a comfortable seat. Leo looked at the ocean. “I’m glad it was your grandfather and not Mr. Hanchett at Dad’s funeral.”

  “So’m I. Mr. Hanchett’s a dear, but he makes even a wedding sound gloomy.”

  “What are you going to do after this summer?” Leo asked, as though he were continuing and not changing the conversation.

  We had been on the Island barely a week when Commander Rodney died. We were all tired, and we thought we had all summer to catch up with everybody, and our attention was on ourselves and on Grandfather. We hadn’t even seen the Rodneys except to wave at in the post office or the market.

  Except for Rob. I knew Rob had gone on his own over to the Coast Guard to see the Commander. I wondered what they’d talked about.

  “Vicky?” Leo prodded. His face was still splotchy and his fair hair was limp.

  “We’re going home to Thornhill and the Regional High,” I answered. “Daddy’s returning to general practice.”

  “You’re not going back to New York, then?”

  “New York was never meant to be forever,” I replied. “Daddy had a year for the research he never had time to do when he was a busy country doctor. And the doctor who took our house and Daddy’s practice was having a sort of sabbatical year from running a big hospital in Chicago, and he has to be back there in September. So we’re going home.”

  “Home.” Leo worked at a small sliver of wood on the old trunk. “The Island’s always been home to me. How did you like living in New York?”

  “I loved it and I hated it. I learned a lot.”

  “Like what?” Leo stopped pulling at the sliver and looked at me.

  I looked out to sea. Near the horizon I saw something dark leap out of the water in a beautiful arc. A porpoise. I shivered. “Oh—how very protected we’d been, living in a tiny village like Thornhill all our lives, with visits to the Island a couple of times a year. I’d been under the illusion that most people are pretty good.”

  “And now you think most people are pretty bad?”

  I shook my head. “But people are a lot more mixed up—more complex—than I thought they were. I thought most adults were like my parents and—yours. But they aren’t.”

  “How come your father’s free to spend the summer on the Island?”

  “Well—I just told you, the other doctor’s going to be in Thornhill till September. And Daddy’s working on a book,” I said to Leo.

  “I thought he was a doctor, not a writer.”

  “He is. It’s not a book-type book, it’s scientific. I wouldn’t understand a word of it.”

  “Are you glad to be going back to Thornhill?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just plain don’t know.”

  I certainly wouldn’t be the same innocent hick who’d left Thornhill a year ago. And we’d made friends in New York, real friends; I didn’t know if we’d ever see them again.

  Leo slid from the old dead elm onto the beach. “I was supposed to go to New York next winter. I was accepted at Columbia. I had a good scholarship, too, and I was counting on your being there.”

  “Well—we lived just a bit below Columbia last year. That’s the part of New York we know best. We can tell you lots about it.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But?”

  “It doesn’t look as though I’ll be going now. Commanders in the Coast Guard don’t leave fortunes to their families.”

  “Aren’t there pensions and stuff?”

  “I don’t think it’s all that much. And I’m the oldest and I’m not sure I ought to go off, leaving Mom and the kids—”

  I looked at his round, earnest face. He wasn’t trying to play on my sympathies the way some kids might (I’d really become very suspicious about human nature in my old age); he was trying to think things out, and what he ought to do. Only a year ago, Leo knew what God thought, and what he and everybody else ought to do on every occasion, and I liked him much better this way, though life used to be easier for him when he knew all the answers.

  I didn’t know the answers, either, but I did know one thing, and I said as much to Leo: “Your parents would both want you to get your education, I’m positive of that. You want to go to Columbia, don’t you?”

  “As much as I’ve ever wanted anything.”

  “Okay, then. And we’ll give you lots of clues about life in that neighborhood. It’s colorful, all right.”

  “Vicky.” He leaned over the grey wood of the elm and reached for my hand. “You really do think it would be all right for me to go off in the autumn? To leave Mom and the kids, with Dad—” He broke off and swallowed hard, so that his Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “I think your mom and the kids would be furious with you if you gave up a good scholarship because you thought they couldn’t manage without you.”

  “But I’m the head of the family now …” It sounded old-fashioned, and yet I knew he meant it from the deepest recesses of his heart.

  “All the more reason you should get a good education.” Gently I withdrew my hand from his. “It doesn’t have to be settled today. And I really think you ought to talk to your mom.”

  Leo’s mother is short and a bit dumpy—he has more of her genes than his father’s—but she radiates good sense. She isn’t very exciting, but she’s solid; if she says she’ll do something, she’ll do it. Enough has happened to me in sixteen years that I’ve begun to stop underrating solidity and overvaluing excitement.

  “I always talked to my dad,” Leo said, and then clamped his jaws shut so tightly that all the muscles of his face were strained, but that didn’t stop the tears overflowing and trickling down his cheeks.

  Without realizing what I was doing, I put my arms around him. “Cry, Leo, don’t hold it back, you need to cry—” I broke off because I was crying, too, crying for Commander Rodney, for my grandfather, who was dying slowly and gently, for a thousand porpoises who had been clubbed to death …

  I held Leo and he held me and we rocked back and forth on the old elm trunk, weeping, and the salt wind brushed against the salt of our tears. And I discovered that there is something almost more intimate about crying that way with someone than there is about kissing, and I knew I’d never again be able to think of Leo as nothing but a slob.

  Our tears spent themselves. I think he stopped first. He pulled up his T-shirt and used it to mop his eyes. He was all red and mottled from weeping, and I supposed I was, too.

  “Let’s swim,” I suggested.

  He looked at me in surprise and I sighed. “Not skinny-dipping. In our underclothes. That’s m
ore than a lot of bathing suits.” I pulled off my jeans and shirt and draped them over the elm, left my sandals on the sand, and ran across the beach to the water. I splashed through the shallow waves, dove under a big comber coming at me, and swam until I was beyond the surf and could turn over on my back and rest on the undulating swells. Leo joined me; he’s a strong, fast swimmer, like any kid who’s grown up on the Island.

  “Don’t go out too far,” he warned. “This bay’s pretty safe, but the tide’s still going out.”

  I couldn’t so much feel it sucking me seaward as notice that I was farther from shore than I had been only a moment before. “Race you in.”

  The swim back took at least three times as long as going out. I was panting when I flung myself onto the crest of a galloping wave and body-surfed into shore. Leo was a good three lengths ahead of me. As I splashed in to join him, I saw Rob climbing down the cliff and calling to us, so we hurried back to Grandfather’s cove and reached him as he jumped onto the beach.

  “Mother says Suzy’s gone to the Rodneys’ with Jacky, so why doesn’t Leo stay and have lunch with us?”

  This was the kind of casual back-and-forthing we were used to on the Island; only today it seemed different. Suzy’s going to the Rodneys’ was different, even though ordinarily the Commander wouldn’t have been home at lunchtime.

  “Sure,” Leo replied. “I’d love to stay. What time is it? I left my watch down the beach with my clothes.”

  “Nearly noon.” Rob pointed at the sun, which was almost directly overhead.

  Leo looked at me. “I didn’t think we’d been gone nearly that long.”

  “We’ll just let our underclothes dry,” I told Rob. “It won’t take more than a few minutes in this sun. Then we’ll get our clothes on and come along up to the stable.”

  “Okay,” Rob said. “I’ll tell Mother.” And he started the hot climb up the cliff.

  Leo and I strolled slowly back to the fallen elm, letting the sun and breeze dry us. Leo made a face. “Yuck, my sneakers are all sopping.”

  “You’ll need them for the climb.” I pulled my shirt over my head and spoke through the warm cotton.

  Leo was strapping on his watch. “Your grandfather—” He stopped, and started trying to shove his sandy feet into his wet sneakers. “I think I know him better than you do.”